Avigdor Arikha, the Israeli artist who learned the power of art as a boy during the Holocaust when he sketched scenes from a concentration camp onto salvaged scraps of paper, has died in Paris. He was 81. Arikha died Thursday from complications of cancer at his home in Paris, where he spent most of his adult life, said Janis Gardner Cecil, sales director of the Marlborough Gallery in New York, which represented him. Arikha, a painter, draftsman and printmaker, became one of Israel's most important contemporary artists, imbuing his portraits and scenes of daily life — a red umbrella against a wall, an overflowing bookshelf, a jumble of bottles in a cabinet — with enigmatic, disconcerting beauty.

With the aid of a "talking computer" and a Braille compass, Jim Dickson set sail from Portsmouth, R.I., in pursuit of a dream: to become the first blind sailor to cross the Atlantic alone. Dickson, 41, of Washington, D.C., bade farewell to about 70 relatives and friends, attached himself to a life belt and set out in his 36-foot motorized sloop Eye Opener. Dickson, who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, has been legally blind since he was 7.

The tradition of hornblowing in this small North Yorkshire city points out that some traditions never die. The tradition of the Ripon Hornblower has been alive and well for 1,100 years. Ripon received its first charter in the form of a horn from King Alfred the Great of Wessex in AD 886. This year Ripon, a small market and manufacturing center of 11,000 people 216 miles north of London, has 1,100 candles on its birthday cake. Not surprisingly, there'll be celebrations aplenty throughout 1986.

November 17, 1985 | Bevis Hillier, Bevis Hillier, associate editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, is author of "A Life in Pictures" (Schocken, 1985), on English poet - laureate John Betjeman, and of a forthcoming Betjeman biography.

As an Englishman, I rooted for the Prince and Princess of Wales--"Lord and Lady Di," as a Los Angeles newscaster recently called them by a felicitous Freudian slip--in America. It was like watching the trapeze artist or tightrope-walker in the circus: You sincerely wanted them not to come a cropper, yet much of the excitement was generated by the knowledge that they could.

Once upon a time in a kingdom faraway, there was a handsome young lord who loved . . . furniture. He loved smooth blond woods inlaid with ebony, rounded bureaus of luscious Swiss pear, sweet little satinwood tables, and long-legged consoles of sycamore and oak. He cared not a whit for titles and jewels--only his woodworking and his beloved "Granny."

May 5, 1994 | BENJAMIN EPSTEIN, Benjamin Epstein is a free-lance writer who regularly contributes to The Times Orange County Edition

The Renaissance Pleasure Faire takes place weekends and Memorial Day through June 5 at Glen Helen Regional Park in Devore. You can get outfitted for the Elizabethan event and get in the mood with more than a little bit of the Brit, anytime in historic downtown Fullerton. Noon to 1: StairMasters were hardly the thing in the Renaissance, so start by cultivating that rotund look and jovial air: Eate, drinke and be merrye at the Olde Ship restaurant and bar.

When I asked about reviewing "The Queen Mother: The Official Biography," the response I got was something like: "It's 1,100 pages long!" Yes, I said, in my most imperturbable royal voice. But that works out to only about 11 pages a year. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother lived to be 101. On her public and private timeline were two world wars, an empire lost, half a century of widowhood -- and a British throne that looked a lot more wobbly when she died in 2002 than it did when she was born during the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1900.

It was one of the cold days of early February, the kind of day when octogenarians such as I are usually content to remain indoors--but not always. I had spent my morning and much of the afternoon in bed, absorbed in reading. It was 2 in the afternoon when I strayed to the living room of my downtown high-rise apartment and found that a neighbor had slipped a magazine, Movieline, under my door.

Thanks to good genes and, perhaps, good gin, Britain's Queen Mother celebrated her 100th birthday Friday, as tens of thousands of well-wishers turned out at Buckingham Palace to salute their favorite royal. Tributes ranged from "Cheers Ma'am"--the headline in the Sun tabloid, which offered free coupons for the Queen Mum's "favorite tipple"--to the traditional card that reigning Queen Elizabeth II sends to all British centenarians. Only this one, written by hand, was signed "Lilibet."

Surprisingly agile. Approaching populist. Almost affordable. Hardly the selling points one would ascribe to any vehicle built by the blokes at Land Rover. Even if they made a Turf Rover lawn mower. This is the British company that kneads and sculpts two-ton lumps of aluminum, walnut and leather into stately Range Rover sport utilities.